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3.6. Semantic Descent and Truth The point about assertion and truth is easily accommodated. So long as one is careful not to equivocate, semantic descent can explain why it is perfectly in order to question, contradict, or assent to metaphorical utterances, and nothing in this explanation requires us either to eschew genuine metaphorical content, or to locate the focus of these truth-evaluating activities in something other than that content. Insensitive though it may be, an interlocutor may counter Romeo's claim, without changing the subject, by telling him:No, Juliet is not the sun.Unlike Davidson, I do not regard this remark as obviously true. For, as intended by the interlocutor, we must see this counter-claim as using the proto-predicate demanded by semantic descent, namely, ‘is the ↓sun↓’; treating the word ‘sun’ here as part of an ordinary linguistic predicate would be to equivocate, thereby turning the interlocutor's remark into a bad joke. The fact that the semantic descent account preserves the intuition about metaphorical truth should be unsurprising, since, as has been noted, it comes under the head ‘Content Sufficient’. It belongs with the proposals of Beardsley, Black, Goodman, and Kittay (among others) who count the creators of metaphors as often straightforwardly aiming to communicate something appropriate to the words they use, and as responsible for the truth of what they assert. When Romeo says that Juliet is the sun, or when the critic says that Tolstoy is an infant, they are each using language to make assertions whose content makes essential use of our knowledge of the meanings of the expressions used, and which might be true, or might be false. 95 This applies equally to high-octane ‘poetic’ metaphors, even though special factors might well intervene to make the mundane, give-and-take practices of assertion inappropriate. The point about truth is not that we always insist on it in metaphorical utterance, but that we must find something to apply it to in those cases where it does figure. In this regard, it should be noted that even unarguably literal claims can be made in poetic contexts without our bothering over their truth or falsity. A poet who writes about certain flowers blooming in May is not thought to be speaking as a botanist. Given its occurrence in a play, Romeo's remark in fact does occur in a truth-irrelevant context, but, for the purposes of the example, I have been following the usual convention of treating the remark as if made by a non-fictional character keen on conveying a truth about the object of his affections. Standing below the balcony, Romeo could have said something non-metaphorical about Juliet and, by that convention, this would have been taken as an assertion. (Imagine that he said: ‘I love that woman.’) So, bracketing the theatrical context, there is no reason, intrinsic to The Semantic Descent Account 121 95 Speech act views such as Searle's also see Romeo as making an assertion, but remember that I have classified indirect speech act views as Content Insufficient because content in the relevant sense is not by itself sufficient to explain what Romeo is doing. However, understood correctly, the content provided by the semantic descent account is sufficient for that purpose. the metaphor, why we should regard (R) as anything other than an assertion for whose truth Romeo takes responsibility. What makes Romeo's remark truth-apt is his qualifying use of the hybrid predicate ‘is the ↓sun↓’, and though this begins with a call on linguistic knowledge, knowledge of the copula, and the descriptive phrase ‘the sun’, the call on his and our knowledge goes beyond this. How far beyond? And in precisely what direction? These questions are in essence those I raised earlier about the processes of semantic descent and qualification, and, as noted, the plan is to deal with them later on. Still, I have to say something here about these questions, even if it is only to give the merest sketch, since I am aware that there might be a certain scepticism about the assertoric credentials of (R), understood in the way suggested. The source of this scepticism is likely to be a certain model of linguistic understanding which, if left unchallenged, can make it seem as if there is a vast, even unbridgeable, difference between ordinary assertions and metaphorical assertions, at least as the latter figure in my account. Since it would take more than a chapter of another book to deal with this thoroughly, my devoting only part of a section to it in this one suggests rightly only the merest outline. But that outline is necessary, and I hope to make it clear enough for one to imagine how to fill it out. Consider this perfectly ordinary assertion that Romeo might have made:(17) Juliet is a woman.What would we count as showing that someone understood an utterance of (17)? It is all too easy to think that in understanding what is said about Juliet here, what is required (at least in part) is a grasp of something—a meaning—which determines, among other things, how to sort items into those which fall under the concept woman, and those which do not. Or, since talk of meanings is out of favour, that what is required is that an interpreter bring to the context of utterance his or her knowledge of the contribution to truth conditions of the predicate expression ‘woman’, where this contribution is thought of as something which is in principle capable of dividing the world into those things which do, and those which do not, satisfy this predicate expression. Of course, these can be perfectly innocuous claims: they may be taken as merely convoluted ways of insisting that anyone who understands (17) must know that it asserts of Juliet that she is a woman. But if one isn't careful they can be taken as the preface to something thoroughly misleading. I have in mind here the model of understanding which takes too seriously the idea of there being such a thing as the meaning of the predicate (perhaps its extension- determining power), and imagines it as a device which an appropriately trained speaker has somehow stored up in his mind, and is able to deploy when required. The trouble with this has nothing to do with the idea that such a device might be an abstract or mental object, and everything to do with the job of work assigned to it. For the idea of a meaning as a device which somehow contains the principle of sorting that goes with ‘woman’ is one that has been rightly criticized by Wittgenstein (and many others). 122 The Semantic Descent Account Of course, it is controversial that there is a problem with this story; many still find it worth telling, even given the Wittgensteinian rule-following arguments. (As far as I can see, psychologists tell this sort of story all the time, not even noticing that the Wittgenstein who gave them family resemblance to play with only a few pages later offered trenchant criticism of a use that has come to be made of family resemblance in the project of representing concepts.) In any case, my aim here is not to detail the arguments against the view—as noted, that is not a task for this book—but simply to warn against allowing it to influence, perhaps subliminally, your understanding of my account of metaphor assertion. For if you think that the predicate in (17) can only be understood by someone who has got hold of some such thing as its meaning or sense, and if you think of this meaning as some sort of device for determining the application of the predicate, then you are apt to be particularly unhappy about my account of Romeo's metaphorical assertion. You are apt to point out that there is nothing in the use of the object—the sun—which corresponds to such a meaning, nothing which fixes a range of application of this object when it is embedded in the linguistic framework of predication. Moreover, in not finding anything that answers to the meaning of qualifying object, you are apt to question anyone's taking Romeo's (R), interpreted in my way, as an assertion. Several examples will show what I am up against. First, imagine a loyal retainer to the Capulet household who overhears Romeo's utterance of (R) and says:It is early and Juliet has just come out on the balcony. Romeo says that she is the sun, but he is deceived. Most mornings Juliet sleeps in until nearly noon: she is after all a teenager.Clearly, it is extremely tempting to describe such a case this way: the retainer takes Romeo to be asserting a thought, but it is not the one we imagined him as expressing. Hence the retainer's assessment of falsity is irrelevant, and communication non-existent. If in this case the retainer had made a simple mistake—perhaps just mishearing Romeo's words—then there would be no problem. But the worry hanging over the semantic descent account of metaphor is the possibility that this kind of thing could be the norm in cases where qualification figures, and hence that the qualifying object simply does not properly fix the extension of the hybrid predicate. Here is a second example. In correspondence, Jerry Fodor (helpfully?) suggested this version of Romeo's (R):Juliet is a real knockout; hot stuff,and, while this might somehow seem more on track than ‘early riser’, it too is unlikely as a rendition of what Romeo said. 96 What lies behind these examples is something like this. In the ordinary case of (17), we can describe an interpreter as having worked out that:(18) Romeo said that Juliet is a woman, The Semantic Descent Account 123 96 It is also, at least faintly, metaphorical, but I shall let that pass here. because this credits the interpreter with the possession of, among other things, the meaning of ‘woman’, and we can rely on anyone who, as it were, owns this meaning to be able correctly to sort things, in virtue of this meaning, into those which satisfy the predicate and those which do not. However, when it comes to (R), my recommendation is that we describe an interpreter as having worked out that:(19) Romeo said that Juliet is the ↓sun↓,but this doesn't seem to come with the same guarantees as (18). That is, (19) does not credit the interpreter with possessing a meaning associated with the sun which would rule out the retainer's and Fodor's unacceptable renditions. Indeed, the worry is that (19), for all that I have said so far, could be used to characterize both the retainer's and Fodor's versions, even though these are plainly enough conflicting. Responding to this, I suggest that the appeal-to-meanings gloss of the straightforward (18), the sentence we use to report an interpretation of (17), is misleading, and this for broadly Wittgenstein's reasons. However, when we understand it correctly, the way is also open to seeing (19) in a more flattering light. When (18) is asserted by some interpreter, what it reports is not the possession of some extension-determining element called the sense or meaning of the predicate ‘woman’. Rather, it reports the fact that, by our lights, the interpreter has made sense, in a specific way, of the speaker's action in producing just those sounds—that the interpreter has managed to fit those sounds into a larger network of attitudes and actions. Here is a way of spelling this out:The adequacy of the total theory [of sense or meaning] would turn on its acceptably imposing descriptions, reporting behaviour as performance of speech acts of specified kinds with specified contents, on a range of potential actions—those that would constitute speech in the language—describable, antecedently, only as so much patterned emission of noise. For that systematic imposing of descriptions to be acceptable, it would have to be the case that speakers' performances of the actions thus ascribed to them were, for the most part, intelligible under those descriptions, in the light of propositional attitudes; their possession of which, in turn, would have to be intelligible, in the light of their behaviour—including, of course, their linguistic behaviour—and their environment. The point of the notion of sense—what the content-specifying component of a total theory of that sort would be a theory of—is thus tied to our interest in understanding—fathoming—people. We have not properly made sense of forms of words in a language if we have not, thereby, got some way towards making sense of its speakers. If there is a pun here, it is an illuminating one. (McDowell 1998: 172) Going perhaps a bit further than this suggestion, but I believe in the same direction, I would describe (18) as a marker of a kind of co-ordination that exists within a linguistic group. The group consists of the speaker of (17), the interpreter of (17) who produces (18), and we who underwrite the interpreter's (18) as a correct interpretation of (17). In effect, our preparedness to accept (18) as true indicates our confidence that Romeo's action in uttering (17) does in fact fit intelligibly within the overall complex of his, the interpreter's, and our own actions and thoughts. We can say that the acceptability of (18) shows there to be a kind of attunement amongst all the participants. Note though that it is one thing to consider (18) as announcing or 124 The Semantic Descent Account marking such attunement, and another to insist that it, or elements in it, bring that attunement about. However tempting it is, (18) should not be thought of as introducing an element, for example, the sense of ‘woman’, whose possession somehow dictates co-ordination amongst the relevant parties. Though there is nothing about Wittgensteinian exegesis that is beyond dispute, I think that this is not only an important element in his rule-following considerations, but is one that could and should be taken on board by philosophers of language. In any case, it is something that I shall accept here, leaving further arguments in its favour for another time and place. If we look at (19), that is:(19) Romeo said that Juliet is the ↓sun↓,in a parallel way, the problem raised by the retainer's and Fodor's versions turns out to be more apparent than real. For if we take (19) as announcing attunement amongst Romeo, an interpreter, and ourselves, rather than as having the role of imposing such attunement, nothing prevents our insisting that, as far as the retainer and Fodor are concerned, (19) is just not warranted. The logic of the original objection went like this: the retainer and Fodor were clearly mistaken about Romeo, but, since each could be characterized by (19), this attribution is just too thin to be an account of what Romeo said. To which I reply: given the proper way to understand such attributions, and the fact that we understand straight-off just how mistaken both the retainer and Fodor are about Romeo's (R), nothing compels us to employ (19); if there is no attunement, then there is no grounds for asserting what is, after all, by our lights a marker of attunement. I can imagine someone thinking that this reply shows a certain perversity. Surely, the idea behind the objection is that the retainer and Fodor can both sign up to (19), because they both do in fact recognize that what is being said is that the sun qualifies Juliet. They do see that what is involved is a metaphor, and they cannot be accused of merely taking the original (R) to be a kind of literal, coded way of saying either that Juliet gets up early or is hot stuff. But, having signed up to (19), each of them goes on to make comments about Romeo's assertion that show them to have misunderstood. And the fault lies, so to speak, not with them but with my account of what Romeo said. There are two things that can be said in reply here. First, I think that this way of putting the objection presumes just the kind of demand on interpretative attributions that I laboured to discredit. (It also shows how easy it is to slip into the mistake of finding such a demand reasonable.) It is simply not the case that when we find an interpreter able to assess a certain utterance as an assertion with the content, say, that a is an F, we are thereby crediting that interpreter with possessing a device which itself correctly determines the application of F. The right picture is really quite the reverse. It is because, by our lights and against a background of intelligibility-conferring attributions, the interpreter has got hold of a certain way of treating things as F, and shares this with the original speaker, that we find correct the interpreter's assessment of the speaker's utterance. Given what is in any case presumed by the objector The Semantic Descent Account 125 to my account, that both the retainer and Fodor do not share an understanding of (R) with Romeo, we should have no hesitation in resisting using our (19) in characterizing their understanding of his assertion. Insisting that the retainer and Fodor both know that (R) is a metaphor and even perhaps that it involves the use of a hybrid predicate (‘is the↓sun↓’) to qualify Juliet, is not enough to make (19) appropriate. It would be enough if the hybrid predicate was a device which itself fixed this application, so that anyone who, as it were, owned it—who knew that it was operative—couldn't make the retainer's or Fodor's mistakes. But this is precisely the picture that we should learn to ignore. The second point to make in reply is somewhat more concessive. I do realize the worry about my account of Romeo's assertion turns in part on a difference between ordinary linguistic predicates and hybrid or proto-predicates. With the ordinary ones, for all that they keep philosophers of language up at night, we use them pretty unreflectively in making assessments of understanding. Romeo utters the sentence:(17) Juliet is a woman,someone hears this and says:(18) Romeo said that Juliet is a woman,and we have little hesitation in thinking that the interpreter got it right. The connections between, for example, Romeo's and the interpreter's linguistic actions using the word ‘woman’, and the no less important connections to the myriad further actions and attitudes of all those who use ‘woman’, are simply and succinctly crystalized in the deployment of the word itself. In contrast, there is no such easy route to the characterizaton of Romeo's claim in (R). However, even while conceding this, I insist that this difference is no more than one of degree. Think of how it can go wrong, even in the purely linguistic case. I have in mind here things the interpreter might go on to say which could make us wonder whether he and Romeo should be seen as occupying the same place in, as it is useful to put it, the space of reasons that the use of ‘woman’ marks. (Using Sellars's metaphor-laden terminology helps to reinforce the earlier point about attributions: Romeo and the interpreter do not come to occupy a location in the space of reasons fixed for them by their use of certain words. Rather, the words have the significance they do in virtue of speaker's and hearer's occupation of some such place. 97 ) For example, if the interpreter of the ordinary (17) went on to claim that Romeo was thereby saying:(20) Juliet is wilful,or:(21) Juliet is subservient, 126 The Semantic Descent Account 97 I do realize that, in using Sellars's phrase so soon after citing McDowell, and going so far as to mention Wittgenstein, I am connecting up my discussion to a literature that is becoming ever more vast, thus rendering my few remarks about this nexus of philosophical theses superficial at best. That said, I make no apologies for making the connection, since I think it important to the overall project in this book. we might begin to wonder whether, as it is often put, he had the same concept of woman as Romeo. Of course, we can wonder this without having yet to give up on (18) as a correct interpretation. However, this is only the beginning, and there are other ways of going on that might leave us less sure about the matter. Suppose that this same interpreter insisted:(22) Romeo said that Juliet was the offspring of his uncle.This might make us wonder whether, from our point of view, the retainer had somehow confounded ‘woman’ and ‘cousin’. And more bizarre continuations can be imagined—continuations which would make it impossible to maintain the pretence that ‘woman’,asitfigures in (18), is the right word to use in characterizing the interpreter's report of Romeo's utterance. With my treatment of Romeo's (R), these same kinds of problem are perhaps more easily conjured up; suggestions like those of the retainer and Fodor do not require much imagination. But what is important is that they present problems no different in kind from those we can come up with by applying our imagination to the linguistic case. On my account of (R), there is no way to capture the content of Romeo's assertion by using purely linguistic predicates. The linguistic means we employ to succinctly characterize the place in the space of reasons which, for example, Romeo in uttering (17), and his interpreter in uttering (18), occupy, just don't work for (R). Nonetheless, this should not lead us to abandon the hybrid-predicate characterization of that content. The predicate expression ‘woman’ contributes to the content of (17) because it is treated as reserving a particular place in the space of reasons; it functions, or is rather allowed to function, without the need for further commentary. 98 The hybrid ‘is the ↓sun↓’ does not get this same treatment—that was conceded above—but, when we look a little deeper, we can see it as no less fit for purpose. The very fact that we can see straight off that the retainer's and Fodor's suggestions are wrongheaded is evidence of this. There are things we know (or believe) about the sun, as well as about the extra-linguistic and linguistic context in which Romeo's assertion was made, which should be seen as background to our use of the hybrid predicate in (19). These are precisely the sorts of thing that I will say more about in the last section of this chapter, but it is important here to have the right view of them. I am not saying that the things we know about the sun etc. are a substitute for things said to be known by language users in respect of ordinary predicate expressions like ‘woman’. Having resisted the picture of understanding ordinary predicates as the possession of devices (concepts?) which impose their correct uses on speakers, I am scarcely looking to fill in The Semantic Descent Account 127 98 Which is not to say that there is something behind the use of ‘woman’ in (17) and (18) which guarantees that the speaker, interpreter, and ourselves are always going to be in step. The use of the word in these formulas indicates, rather than determines, co-ordination or attunement, so things could go badly wrong, even though they have gone swimmingly up to the point of our acquiescing in this particular interpretative use of ‘woman’. a similar picture in respect of hybrid predicates. The point about those things we know about the sun, and about the background to Romeo's utterance, is not that they constitute such device, but that they help us identify the place in the space of reasons appropriate to the hybrid predicate as used by, and of, Romeo when he utters (R). 99 For all that we put our faith in the use of ‘woman’ in certifying the attribution in (18), that faith is grounded on the background knowledge we have of the things people think about the world, about each other, and of course it is no less dependent on the things they do, and the reasons for which they do them. Similarly, our faith in the hybrid predicate's potential to reflect the content of Romeo's (R) is grounded in such knowledge, notwithstanding a tendency to think that purely linguistic predicates can do their interpretative work without explicitly calling on any such outside help. Indeed, it would be surprising if there were not some such difference between literal assertions like (17) and metaphors. For if there weren't such a difference, metaphor would simply not be the phenomenon it is. (I shall say more about this in the next section, where I consider the issue of paraphrase.) More promissory notes have been issued, but the upshot of the section has been a defence of our using down-arrow representations in specifying the truth-relevant content of the assertions made with metaphors. These representations reflect the background against which the qualifying use of the appropriate object is made. 128 The Semantic Descent Account 99 At the risk of introducing just that bit too much of McDowell, let me try to make the point about attributions, using his notion of ‘sideways-on’ vs direct (i.e. not sideways-on) perspectives. Everything up to now has been mainly about our view of the interpreter's view of Romeo's utterance, all of it therefore sideways-on. Think now about how Romeo might conceive of his utterance (apologies to Shakespeare). He sees the sun on a wonderful spring morning, and finds it to convey information about Juliet; the sun, he reckons (in my terminology) qualifies Juliet. In doing so, he is guided by what he knows about the sun, what he believes, what he believes others believe or know, etc. All of this leads him to make the assertion (R). In doing so, he expects to be understood. Why? Because (as my account has it) his words are straightforward and he expects that his audience will perfectly well understand the kind of background information relevant to this particular qualification. Now imagine the retainer and Fodor approach him: the first says, ‘So you mean she gets up early’, and the second ‘So you mean she's hot stuff’. Here I expect Romeo to be exasperated with the retainer and Fodor, not with himself. From his point of view, he has a perfectly good thought, it was the reason he said what he did, and he would expect that others who share the background information about the sun, and understand him would also understand his utterance. Yet these two characters just didn't get it. Could he have somehow spoken sloppily? Did his words have an ambiguity he should have avoided? How could he put his uncomprehending auditors right? These are all questions from Romeo's point of view—a view that is definitely not sideways-on—but since it is my example, I will take the liberty of imagining some answers from my sideways-on perspective. Romeo did not speak sloppily or ambiguously, no more so than anyone does who uses words that require some sensitivity to what is going on. It was simply that the auditors did not show the requisite sensitivity. Surely, Romeo had a right to think that his auditors knew as much about the sun as he did, and also knew that he was talking about Juliet, the object of his love and devotion. There is a range of things his auditors could have said which might have surprised (even delighted him) because one can often find that one's meaning is best elucidated and expanded upon by someone else. But Romeo is right to think that the retainer and Fodor simply didn't get it. How to help them? Well, he could say some things about the sun by way of elucidation, he could say some things about Juliet by way of providing reasons for his remark. But as for the remark itself, nothing needs to be added: it is not the predicate to which the sun contributed that needs modification, just the auditors. (More on the contrast between the elucidation of a metaphor and a reason for it in the next section.) They do not by themselves impose uses of the necessarily hybrid predicate that figures in the representation of the metaphor. But that is not something we should expect, even of purely linguistic predicates as used in specifying the content of common-or-garden literal assertions. Whether we are speaking of purely linguistic predicates or my hybrid ones, these figure, not as ways of imposing certain patterns of use, but as marking an attunement in thought and action between speaker, hearer, and all other participants in the space of reasons. 3.7. Paraphrase According to my account, understanding a metaphor consists in fastening onto an object-exemplar of a relevant predicate, and then taking that object as a qualifier of the metaphor's subject. 100 In this way, a hearer who is attuned to the predicative use of that object comes to understand something about the subject of the metaphor, while justifiably considering the speaker responsible for the truth of that information. In sum, all the ingredients of common-or-garden assertion are present in metaphor. However, since the information is conveyed using a hybrid predicate—one which contains an object in a qualifying role—it would be bizarre to ask someone to express this same information in other words. Admittedly, it is words in the metaphor that call on the object. But it is what I have also called the ‘proto- predicate’, object included, which conveys a message, not the words themselves. Since the speaker is using an object, not words, to convey a message, it makes no sense even to try to paraphrase a metaphor in the strict sense of the term. A useful way to think of it is that, on the semantic descent account, a metaphor functions like a picture, diagram, or map. As we saw in Chapter 1, a request to paraphrase a picture makes no sense, but then again neither does a request to paraphrase an object. Nonetheless, there is plenty of house-room in the semantic descent account for the other activities with which paraphrase is all too easily confused. I am referring here to translating, elucidating, and generally commenting on metaphors. 3.7.1. Paraphrase and translation As already noted, it is not usually all that difficult to translate a metaphor into another language. This somewhat mysterious fact has been noted by many writers, but has never been to my mind satisfactorily explained. While native English speakers find it hard to imagine how, in general, the power and beauty of Shakespeare's language can survive translation, we do not have the same difficulty with certain bits of that language, bits such as Romeo's description of Juliet. Whether she is ‘le soleil’, ‘il sole’,or‘die Sonne’ makes little difference to the impact of the original metaphor. Nor, on the semantic descent account, would we expect it to. For, on that account, what is being translated is the word or phrase The Semantic Descent Account 129 100 Just to remind you: I don't think that metaphors are even mostly subject-predicate in form. For the present, however, I am not questioning this all-too-common assumption, because it makes exposition easier. In the next chapter, it will be shown how the semantic descent account copes with the syntactical variety of realistically complex examples. before, as it were, descent to the proto-predicate takes place. So long as these translations preserve reference we should expect, rather than be surprised by, their adequacy. One must be careful here: a superficial reading of my claim about preservation of reference can make it seem vulnerable to obvious counterexamples. For example, assuming that the sun is my favourite heavenly body, does this mean that we can translate Romeo's assertion into French as:(R1) Juliet est le corps céleste favori de SG?Or, given that the sun undergoes nuclear fusion, does this make the following a good translation:(R2) Juliet est un four nucléaire, autour de qui la terre fait sa revolution?Clearly, the answer to both of these questions is ‘no’, but then neither is really a serious counterexample to my original claim. What I contend is that, in cases where the words in a metaphor in a source language are replaced by their standard or usual translational counterparts in a target language, the semantic descent account can explain the surprising fact that metaphorical effect is preserved. The standard translational counterpart of ‘the sun’ in French is neither ‘le corps céleste favori de SG’, nor ‘un four nucléaire, autour de qui la terre fait sa revolution’. So, though reference is preserved when these expressions are substituted for ‘the sun’, they are not reference-preserving translations. Couldn't there be cases in which the only available way to render ‘the sun’ preserved reference, but led to hopeless translations of the metaphor? Suppose, for example, that in some language, Native, the best you could do for ‘sun’ would be something which came back into English as: ‘the evil staring eye of the Ox-god who rises from bed every morning’. (For whatever reason, the speakers in this community regard the sun as threatening and malevolent.) Clearly, this:(R3) Juliet is the evil staring eye of the Ox-god who rises from bed every morning.disfigures Romeo's remark. But doesn't it also undermine my claim about translation? Someone might insist that we have in (R3) a translation which preserves reference but doesn't cope with Romeo's metaphor. Though the matter is somewhat intricate, I think this possibility is no real objection to what I have claimed. My defence proceeds on two fronts. The first of these is straightforward: I have not insisted that every putative translation of an expression preserves the metaphorical content of the original; merely that when there is preservation, it can be most naturally explained by the semantic descent account. The second defensive front is less straightforward: there is good reason to wonder whether we should accept that, in respect of ‘sun’, translation between English and Native is genuinely possible. And, even if we do accept that translation is possible, the result is more supportive than undermining of semantic descent. More detail on both strategies follows. 130 The Semantic Descent Account [...]... that the kinds of objects my account calls on in metaphor are typically enmeshed in rich, and often acquired, patterns of thought and behaviour Objects called on by metaphors are not merely particulars, actions, events, and states of affairs with which we causally interact; they are often bearers of what I earlier rather weakly called ‘cultural’ significance In ways that are more the concern of anthropologists... to a content so profound as to be implausible As has been mentioned, meaning is non-optionally heard in the utterance of (R), but it is most certainly not the kind of content that makes elucidatory or rationalizing commentary on the metaphor otiose What transparency requires of accounts of metaphor is that they come up with a notion of content relevant to the metaphorical aspirations of utterances, but... and then the metaphorical comprehension of any given metaphor Rather, it is the average time taken for comprehension of flatly literal sentences (of various syntactic complexities) in comparison with the time taken for sentences that are metaphorical (but match the literal ones in complexity) Clearly enough, if there is a dependence of metaphor comprehension on the discovery of the falsehood of the literal,... elucidation within the category of metaphor commentary; and finally it offers a straightforward reason to stick with the notion of paraphrase as it is ordinarily and strictly understood 3.8 Transparency I begin with a brief résumé of my discussion of this feature of metaphor, as it is the least familiar of the three, and hence most subject to misunderstanding Also, some of the points made above in connection... no temptation to count either of these as a ‘paraphrases’ of the scene and, though the context is different, the explanation of this is pretty much the same as in the case of metaphor, namely, the fact that the scene itself did not say anything in words 136 The Semantic Descent Account metaphor, attunement must be grounded on a shared appreciation of the significance of objects Our attunement to Romeo's... were true of Native and English in respect of the sun, then it would certainly be unreasonable to deny that translation is possible But it would be no less unreasonable if we thought of these translations as preserving metaphor Does admitting this undermine the idea that semantic descent explains the relative ease of translation of metaphor? The answer is ‘no’, partly because of my first line of defence:... something familiar, and not the upshot of such research.1 05 ‘Transparency’ is the label that I use for this feature, albeit with some misgivings, and what I insisted in Chapter 1 was both that transparency is as true of metaphor as it is of unarguably literal sentences and that many accounts of metaphor could not cope with this parity In showing why certain accounts of metaphor cannot cope with transparency,... this term of our ability to use objects as qualifiers of other objects However, while these answers suggest something like surrender, this is not so The lack of compositionality of objects in their qualifying roles is only problematic if it threatens whatever compositionality we think we find in natural language But, on my account, no such threat exists Indeed, it is precisely one of the virtues of that... deserve, we can relieve the pressure on the notion of paraphrase Neither rationalization nor elucidation of a metaphor is any more a way of paraphrasing than is translation Moreover—and this is the most important bit—the semantic descent account helps us understand what is going on in respect of all of these notions It suggests why translation of metaphor succeeds, against the odds for translation... sentences like ( 25) as genuine attempts to put Romeo's thought into words This is what makes the semantic descent account particularly important in the present context: it gives us a way to preserve the irreducibility of metaphor, while still making space for elucidatory and explanatory comments about particular metaphors The Semantic Descent Account 1 35 is a deepening of understanding of both a metaphor . commentary on the metaphor otiose. What transparency requires of accounts of metaphor is that they come up with a notion of content relevant to the metaphorical aspirations of utterances, but. to offer the IA as genuine rival to my own account of metaphor. After all, the IA fails to negotiate the truth aptness of many metaphors, and, as described above, it is limited to metaphors of. preserve the irreducibility of metaphor, while still making space for elucidatory and explanatory comments about particular metaphors. is a deepening of understanding of both a metaphor and its author.